Thursday, June 6, 2013

I reviewed Suzanne Corkin's book on the famous amnesiac HM for the Literary Review's May 2013 edition:Total Lack of Recall Permanent Present Tense: The Man with No Memory, and What He Taught the World
By Suzanne Corkin
(Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 384pp £20)

In February 2009, a pair of neuroscientists carried an icebox through gate security at Logan Airport in Boston, under the gaze of a PBS film crew sent to document the event. Bypassing the security scanner so as not to expose the contents of the cooler to radiation, one of the researchers carried the box onto a waiting plane while the other, the neuropsychologist Suzanne Corkin, waved goodbye to her life’s work. Packed in ice inside the cooler was a human brain – possibly the most famous brain in history. It belonged to the amnesiac Henry Molaison, whose recent death had allowed his identity (for so long shrouded behind the initials ‘HM’) to be released to the world.

Corkin, who probably knew Henry better than anyone else, worked with him from 1962, when she was a graduate student, to his death in 2008. Over the decades, neuropsychologists, psychologists and neuroscientists probed his short- and long-term memory, his language abilities and reasoning skills, with Corkin as the gatekeeper to this precious scientific resource. Although he found her face familiar, he never really understood who she was, and tended to assume that she was an old classmate from his high school in Hartford, Connecticut.

Henry’s amnesia stemmed from a psychosurgical procedure intended to alleviate severe epilepsy. In the psychology textbooks, there is sometimes a suggestion that this was a cruel and unnecessary procedure, akin to the abhorrent lobotomies that were current at the time. Corkin is at pains to show that this was not a random act of cruelty or medical neglect, and that Henry’s debilitating fits provided good reason for conducting the surgery. William Beecher Scoville’s ‘frankly experimental’ procedure involved the removal of structures in the medial temporal lobes (deep in the brain above each ear), with devastating and unforeseen effects on Henry’s memory.

Henry’s amnesia was so profound, and so neatly sparing of his other cognitive abilities, that he quickly became the most famous amnesia case study of them all. There will hardly be a psychology graduate alive who doesn’t know the details: HM’s inability to form new memories was coupled with a preserved capacity to acquire new skills, such as learning to use a walking frame. After the operation, Henry’s grip on the past amounted to a total of two genuine autobiographical memories: an aeroplane flight taken when he was 13 and the taste of his first cigarette when he was 10. For the 55 years until his death, he created no new memories.

Most importantly of all, HM taught scientists about the importance of medial temporal lobe structures (predominantly the hippocampus) in converting short-term memories into long-term ones. Scientifically this is a hugely important story, and many will be excited that here, at last, is a chance to see the man behind the initials. In the right hands, this could have been a story of where the brain ends and the person begins, of the ethics of the close study of one individual. But readers who hope to understand Henry as a person will be disappointed. We rarely get to witness any of the human details that might bring him alive as a character. In one sense this is easily understandable: the observations of Henry were made for scientific, not biographical, purposes, and so the human element is largely unrecorded. But it is a scientifically informed biography that we are promised, and this worthy, detailed and ultimately rather lifeless book fails to meet that expectation in a number of ways.

Part of the problem is a predictable neuro-reductionist arrogance. Because Henry had a damaged brain, his brain becomes the cause of everything. We are told that Henry could not have had normal dreams, for example, because the necessary regions of his brain had been replaced by fluid-filled spaces. Anything that might have shaped his character beyond the effects of drugs or psychosurgery is left unexplored. No one would attempt to write a biography of an intact or more ordinarily damaged person by relating everything to brain structure. If they did, the results would be as dull as this.

There is nothing to suggest that Suzanne Corkin was anything other than a kind, attentive carer who wanted the best for her patient, as well as being an extremely thorough scientist (though her excitement at finally getting a chance to ‘harvest’ Henry’s brain will prove chilling for many readers). This is a human tragedy, and it deserves an approach that goes beyond the mere enumeration of clinical findings. Although we get plenty of ethics-committee discussion of the rights and wrongs of Henry’s story, along with tantalising flashes of the man’s personality (he had a quirky tendency to refer to Corkin as ‘Doctress’, for example), we get little insight into what Henry might have gone through or what emotions he would have grappled with. Corkin’s account has none of the richness of, say, Joshua Foer’s brief encounter with an amnesiac in his recent Moonwalking with Einstein, or (switching to a case of excessive rather than defective memory) of A R Luria’s classic portrait of S V Shereshevsky in The Mind of a Mnemonist. A more skilful writer might have saved us from learning what a human being becomes when he is boiled down to clinical data. HM’s personal tragedy had immensely valuable consequences; the disappointment of this book is that an individual has been reduced to an interesting brain.

Published in the Literary Review, May 2013 (reproduced with permission).

"This may be a golden age of science writing -- we had to choose from well over a hundred wonderful books covering a huge range of topics. Many of them would have deserved a place on the list", said Professor Uta Frith, Chair of the judges.

"We happily and unanimously agreed on the long list, but we each had favourites that we were sad not to be able to include."

The wide variety of subjects covered by these books is exciting -- there's something here for everyone!

"We are very pleased that almost all of our selected books are ambitiously grounded in several subjects at once, be it biology, physics, psychology, or technology" continued Professor Frith. "The judges all commented on how much they enjoyed the process. It was an inspiring task."

The judges on this year's panel are Jon Culshaw, impressionist and comedian; Dr Emily Flashman, Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellow at University of Oxford; Professor Uta Frith DBE FBA FRS (Chair), Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Development at University College London; Joanne Harris, novelist and author of Chocolat; and Lucy Siegle, journalist and writer on environmental issues.

Besides providing the reading public with an excellent list of science books to read whilst on holiday at the beach, the longlist announcement coincides with a panel discussion at the World Science Festival held right now my fair city, New York. This festival is hosting a panel discussion entitled "Science and story: cutting-edge discovery for a literary public", with James Gleick, winner of the 2012 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books and two of the 2012 shortlisted authors Lone Frank and Brian Greene.

I'm delighted to be on such an illustrious list, and am looking forward to catching up with the other longlisted titles. I haven't read nearly enough of them, but I'm pleased to see Caspar Henderson's amazing Book of Barely Imagined Beings on there.

Buy A Box Of Birds

Buy Pieces of Light (UK)

A Box of Birds: Reviews

'Arrestingly good prose… A thought-provoking novel that wrestles with the fundamentals of human nature.' Financial Times

'The plot, which flies past at genuine ‘page turner’ pace, involves a race to map the (fictional) Lorenzo Circuit, ‘the deep root-system of the self… the basis of memory, emotion and consciousness in the human brain’… I’m grateful for the siren warnings from the storytelling machine that is Charles Fernyhough.' The Psychologist

'A pleasantly sardonic narrator… There is… a certain edgy propulsion to the story, and the reveal of what is really going on in the bowels of Sansom’s research centre is deliciously horrible and deftly understated.' Guardian

'Part love story, part race against time to beat the baddies, Fernyhough can certainly write.' Daily Mail

'It’s rare these days to read a writer who cares about ideas in the way that the great nineteenth-century novelists did... This is both a serious novel and a great read.' Sara Maitland

'Exhilarating, thought-provoking and well worth the wait.' Andrew Crumey

Pieces of Light: Reviews

'Pieces of Light is utterly fascinating and superbly written. I learned more about memory from this book than any other. There are few science books around of this class.' Guardian

'Thoughtful… a deft guide to discoveries that have led memory researchers to stress the centrality of storytelling.' Booklist

'As absorbing as it is thought-provoking.' Sunday Business Post

'Remarkable storytelling skills... Seamlessly intersperses the personal aspects of [his] journey with descriptions of cutting-edge research into spatial naviation and memory manipulation, as well as new ideas about how memory works.' Moheb Costandi, Scientific American MIND

'With elegance and clinical sympathy, Fernyhough tells the stories of patients with various forms of brain damage that result in amnesia... a good, accessible read for anyone interested in their own recollections.' Professor Steven Rose, BBC Focus Magazine

'An absorbing guidebook to the mysterious terrain of human memory... In the tradition of Oliver Sacks’ casually shrewd scientific writing, the book blends dispatches from the frontiers of science with compassionate human anecdotes. Fernyhough’s enthralling narrative delivers gripping insight on the way memories shape our lives.'Editors’ Choice for w/c 19 March, iBookstore

'Weaving scientific research from psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology, Fernyhough explains that our brains don’t record experiences as cameras do; rather, we store key elements, then reconstruct the experiences when we need them, imbuing them with present-day feelings and the benefit of hindsight.' Washington Post(read more)

'In its stunning blend of the literary with the scientific, Pieces of Light illuminates ordinary and extraordinary stories to remind us that who we are now has everything to do with who we were once, and that identity itself is intricately rooted in transporting moments of remembrance. We are what we remember.' André Aciman, author of Out of Egypt and Harvard Square

'His examination [is] welcoming and accessible to lay readers. His analysis is wide-ranging... He also covers a wide swath of literary and historical ground... A refreshingly social take on an intensely personal experience.' Publishers Weekly (read more)

'A multidisciplinary approach to explaining memory... Will be intriguing for readers interested in the borderlands where memoir, fiction and science overlap.' Kirkus Reviews (read more)

'In this lyrical exploration of our powers of recall, psychologist and novelist Charles Fernyhough argues that our memories are worth cherishing - even though some of what we think we remember is, in fact, fiction.' New Scientist Books of the Year (read more)

'In Pieces of Light, Charles Fernyhough has had the arresting idea of writing a book about memory that is also a memoir. As a psychologist clearly well up on the latest research, he shows how memory itself relies on language and storytelling. Investigating his own memories with a writerly eye, he brings to vibrant life scenes from a childhood refreshingly free of misery.' Sunday Times Books of the Year (read more)

'In his hybrid of autobiography, journalism and pop psychology, Fernyhough lets the stories speak for themselves to highlight memory’s personal, subjective and fragile qualities. Fernyhough takes us on a captivating journey into the mind. And he does so with great style.' Telegraph (read more)

'Outstanding… Fernyhough’s skills as a writer are evident both in the beautiful prose and in the way he uses literature to illustrate his argument… He draws on both science and art to marvellous effect.' Observer (read more)

'Restrained and lyrical... an immense pleasure.' New Scientist (read more)

'A sophisticated blend of findings from science, ideas from literature and examples from personal narratives… refreshing, well judged and at times moving. This is an unusual book but a very rewarding one.' Times Higher Education (read more)

'Fernyhough deftly guides us through memory's many facets... Often using himself as a test case, he adds context with research and snippets from a raft of great writers. A thoughtful study of how we make sense of ourselves.' Nature (read more)

'Absorbing... In offering us a meditation on memory, Fernyhough has something important to say about one of the forces that is central to our lives.' The Lady (read more)

'Fernyhough is a gifted writer who can turn any experience into lively prose... The stories in Pieces of Light... will entertain anyone who reads them.' Financial Times (read more)

'Many popular science writers try to blend the autobiographical and the anecdotal into their work; few do it as seamlessly and successfully as Charles Fernyhough.' Blackwell's Book Podcasts (read more)

'Fernyhough argues that we don’t simply possess a memory; we reconstruct it anew every time we need to remember… Through his own experiences and those of others, from the very young to the very old, he explores the mystery of remembering and the ambiguity of forgetting.' Saga Magazine

'An enthralling investigation of that ‘thing’ we call memory… manages to write about complex things in a clear and understandable way.' Ian McMillan, The Verb

'Pieces of Light will both linger in your memory and change the way you think about it.’ Daniel L. Schacter